AEA associate executive secretary Joe Reed retires

Joe Louis Reed started fighting for his version of justice in the 1950s, right out of the Army, and did not stop, even in his last weeks at the Alabama Education Association.

By Dana BeyerleMontgomery Bureau

MONTGOMERY | Joe Louis Reed started fighting for his version of justice in the 1950s, right out of the Army, and did not stop, even in his last weeks at the Alabama Education Association.The 73-year-old associate executive secretary of the AEA is retired Dec. 31 after 42 years, along with AEA executive secretary Paul Hubbert, ending one of the most powerful political partnerships in Alabama history.AEA attorney Gregory Graves was elected Reed’s successor and AEA financial analyst and former state finance director Henry Mabry was named Hubbert’s successor.“I like a few things. I like to hunt,” Reed said in a Dec. 13 interview. “I’ll do my memoirs and be sure we build (the AEA) and help it what I can.”His memoirs will include the details of his background and rise to the top of the AEA: Reed was born in 1938 in Conecuh County in the deepest part of the Deep South, served in an integrated U.S. Army, returned to a segregated South, joined the growing civil rights movement and was aided by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.“The last time I saw Martin King was on the poor people’s campaign right before he was assassinated in 1968,” Reed said.In 1969, Reed merged the all-black Alabama State Teachers Association and the all-white AEA into an AEA comprising about 30,000 members. Today, the AEA is about 100,000 strong.In his years at the AEA, Reed filed and won landmark lawsuits over legislative redistricting and political action committee funding. Just this month, a federal judge ruled in favor of the Alabama Democratic Conference, which Reed chairs, over a law that prohibited the ADC’s political action committee from receiving funds from other PACs for voter programs.He has led the ADC, which was formed to support the 1960 Democratic Party presidential nominee, John F. Kennedy, for 40 years.Over the years, Reed has bucked governors, helped promote education causes at the AEA and created black legislative districts. “I‘ve been a blessed man going from a rigid segregated society when no one pretended to a time when we at least pretend there’s justice and fairness to everybody,” he said.He made political enemies, but the AEA protected him from economic and job reprisal. “I was employed and paid by teachers and I had economic security from day one and everybody knew that,” Reed said.Former Gov. Don Siegelman called Reed a political dinosaur because he represented the old style of politics that required candidates to appear before the ADC for endorsements.Thomas Vocino, a retired political science professor at Auburn University Montgomery, said Reed deserves credit for organizing the black vote in Alabama in the 1960s and ’70s.Former U.S. Rep. Artur Davis, D-Ala., the state’s first black major party gubernatorial candidate, learned the power of the ADC when Reed refused to endorse him because Davis wouldn’t appear before an ADC screening committee. “No Democrat in their right mind would reject a black organization,” Reed said.The 1969 merger of the Alabama State Teachers Association with the AEA brought blacks into the mainstream of Alabama politics, Vocino said.But Reed was not known for accommodating younger, emerging black leaders, who formed the Alabama New South Coalition around the now-deceased Sen. Michael Figures, D-Mobile, and Sen. Hank Sanders, D-Selma, and the Jefferson County Citizens Coalition around then-Birmingham Mayor Richard Arrington Jr.“Over time, his power has waned and I think it would be fair to say other organizations have more influence over the black vote … but he is still a player until his retirement,” Vocino said.Reed was chairman of the Alabama State University board of trustees and thwarted gubernatorial efforts to put whites on the board. “That was a no-no,” Reed said of Fob James’ effort to put the now-deceased Montgomery Mayor Emory Folmar on the board.Athens State University government and public affairs professor Jess Brown said Hubbert and Reed successfully created a biracial organization. They “recognized long before others the impact of the newly enfranchised black vote stemming from the Voting Rights act of 1965,” Brown said.Reed graduated from Conecuh County Training School in 1956 and joined the integrated Army. He worked in a MASH outfit in post-Korean War Korea. On the way back to Alabama, his train entered Arkansas and returned him to segregated life.“What happened was on a bus we stopped to eat and the white recruits — we hadn’t even got uniforms — white recruits went to the front of the restaurant and the black recruits went to the back window. That was on our way in,” Reed said. “When we came back to Seattle on a boat, all we blacks and whites rode together. Then when we got from Missouri to Arkansas to be discharged at Fort Chaffee, the black soldiers had to get on separate seats, in different portions of the train, segregated. The troop trains when they got to Arkansas, they divided us.”At Alabama State, he worked for 25 cents an hour and got involved in the sit-in movement and was put on probation. But he graduated, and two years later became executive secretary of the Alabama State Teachers Association. He was 26.Merger talks soon began with the politically dormant AEA. “We negotiated a merger, put it together and I brought a new dynamic of massive litigation. We just took the position we going to sue and we started litigating for our members,” Reed said. A redistricting lawsuit created back-to-back legislative elections in 1982 and 1983, and helped increase the number of blacks in the Legislature.In his later years, Reed was defeated in a re-election bid to the Montgomery City Council and was not reappointed to the ASU board of trustees.He even suffered the humility of having his name removed from ASU’s Joe Reed Acadome basketball arena and all-purpose facility, but dismisses it.“That was jealousy on the part of some board members and, secondly, they wanted to spend money they didn’t have,” Reed said.After almost 50 years on the front line, Reed said he’s proud of the successful merger of the black and white teacher organizations.“We demonstrated the AEA was for everybody,” Reed said. “Paul and I worked together to try to make things happen. Over the last 40 years nothing could divide us but race. If we can keep race out of it we’ll do well.”